Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Katie
“Willamette Park,” Gwen said.
“Guilty,” I said to the phone I’d propped on the bed while I sorted my clothes.
“Outside Hollywood Vintage clothing store. In the bar of the Sapphire Hotel.”
“Guilty of both.” I smiled as I took a shirt from a hanger.
“I know you’re guilty,” Gwen said. She was in her L.A. apartment, scrolling on her phone as she talked to me on her iPad. “I’ve seen it. I never thought I would say this, but do you have to kiss your boyfriend quite so much?”
I rummaged through my underwear, still smiling. In the two weeks since I’d first slept with Travis, we’d done a good amount of kissing in public. When your public kisses are photographed and posted to social media, it might seem like too much.
It wasn’t too much. At all.
“It’s impulsive,” I explained to my assistant. “He’s my boyfriend. People kiss their boyfriends—it isn’t news. No one has to look, and they definitely don’t have to take pictures.”
“I can sort of understand it,” Gwen said, still scrolling. “He’s hot, but you don’t have to—Wait, you kissed him in Powell’s Books?”
“I couldn’t help it.” I grabbed another hanger. “We were book shopping together, Gwen. Book shopping. And he was standing in the aisle, holding books that he actually reads , and he looked so cute, and I just walked up and kissed him.”
“Okay, that one, I understand,” she admitted. “Any man looks hot while book shopping, but Travis White is next level. I can’t decide whether this picture is sexy or annoying.”
“It’s sexy,” I supplied. It had been a great kiss—spontaneous, enthusiastic, sweet. I’d melted into Travis without thinking. It went without saying that we’d forgotten our original rule to discuss kissing before it happened. Now we just did it whenever we wanted.
“Katie, PDA is so out of style,” Gwen argued. “It’s uncool. No one does this sappy stuff anymore.”
“I’ll tell you what. When you’re dating the hottest guy you’ve ever seen, then you don’t have to kiss him in public. Or ever. I don’t care. But he’s my boyfriend, and if I want to kiss him in a bookstore, then I will.”
A throat cleared softly behind me, and I turned to see Travis standing at the top of the loft stairs, leaning on one hip, listening to me. He looked pleased.
Gwen couldn’t see him on her screen, so she kept talking. “Okay, you’re in your Hot Girl era. I get it. The comments are mostly positive.” She scrolled, scanning Instagram comments, which she spent more time doing these days so that I wouldn’t have to. “People think you’re cute. They like the clothes I got you. They think Travis looks fuckable. There are rumors of a new album. The negatives—except for the usual unhinged assholes—are that Travis is going to break your heart because he’s an unreliable jerk. Also, you’re going to break his heart, because you’re using him for sex while he’s actually in love. Basically, you two are doomed.”
I glanced at Travis. His smile had dimmed, and he looked thoughtful. “Anything else I need to know?” I asked Gwen.
“Not really, just people with no lives commenting online. Between us, though, you look better than you did when you left L.A. You said you were orgasmed out, and I didn’t believe you, but now I think he must have upped his game, because lately you really are orgasmed out?—”
“Bye, Gwen.” I jabbed the screen to end the call. I turned to Travis—to apologize, maybe—but he had moved closer and was already behind me. Without speaking, he put his hands on my shoulders, squeezing gently, then rubbing.
My mind went blank with pleasure. I leaned back into the firm warmth of his chest and closed my eyes. His fingers massaged expertly up the sides of my neck, his thumbs working the back of my neck under my hair. He smelled good.
“Sorry about Gwen,” I managed to say, trying to sound rational through the waves of heat that were spiraling through my body.
Travis’s response was a noncommittal mmm sound. His hands continued their magic. I felt his calluses from guitar playing against my skin, and it turned me on even more.
I leaned my weight back into him, letting my muscles relax into jelly. He was lean and warm, familiar. My blood flushed hot. His hands left my neck and dropped to my waist, where he lifted the hem of my shirt just enough to sneak under it. His palms caressed my belly, then up, where they cupped my breasts over my bra. He lowered his mouth to the side of my neck and kissed me there. I let out a gasp of pleasure that was mixed with an embarrassing groan.
“We keep doing this,” I managed to say.
“Yeah,” he replied.
We hadn’t stopped after that first night. We probably should have, but then there was the next night, and the night after that. There was morning sex with Travis, and making out with Travis on the sofa while we tried to watch TV, which led to even more sex with Travis. Every time, my brain repeated, Just one more time. Why not? What could it hurt? Just this once. And then again. Just this once.
Just this once, I thought as his fingers drew down the cups of my bra and brushed over my nipples.
For the last two weeks, I hadn’t had to think about how to play a sex goddess who was having a wild fling with a rock star. Because I was one.
“We have to,” Travis reasoned, his voice hoarse against my skin. “You’re leaving.” To say he had been enthusiastic over the last two weeks was an understatement. He was as horny as I was. He was skilled. He was attentive. He could go fast or slow with equal creativity. He seemed to have made a map of my body and memorized it, because he knew everything.
“I have to go back to L.A.,” I said reluctantly. “You know that. It’s only for a few days.” He had to stay in Portland to finish some of the work on his new album, but he was going to follow me to L.A. when he was finished.
“The premiere of The Love Fix-Up, ” he promised, the words warm against my skin. The Love Fix-Up was the movie I’d shot before High School Reunion , and it was about to release. “I’ll be there.”
“It won’t be a big deal,” I said for the dozenth time. Netflix premieres were industry events, not spectacles. There would be some press there and a few photographers, as well as the cast, the producers, the director. We’d take photos outside the theater, then watch the movie inside. The cast would appear onstage afterward and answer questions for twenty minutes. Then there would be the inevitable party, and we’d all go home. It would not be an earth-moving news story.
But it was going to be our first official public appearance as a couple. Travis had told me about how my name had softened the Road Kings’ reception of him, and Stella had sent me another script that was offered to me because I’d accepted the thriller script, and word was getting out that I wasn’t typecast in romcoms anymore. The message she sent with the script was simply: It’s working.
I didn’t care about that as Travis’s hands moved to my back and unclasped my bra. We were going to be apart for four whole days until he joined me in L.A. The thought made my body ache. I turned around in his arms, put my arms around his neck, and kissed him.
We did a lot of kissing—Gwen was right about that. What we did in public were quick kisses, affectionate and sweet, and they were nothing compared to what we did when we were alone. We made out as much as we had sex. In the kitchen while making dinner. In the shower. In bed, long sessions that turned into agonizing foreplay, his mouth and hands moving slowly down my body until I lost my mind. Kissing me—all over—seemed to be Travis’s new hobby.
I’d often thought I needed a new hobby in my life, something outside of my job. Marathon running? Art collecting? As I lifted my arms for Travis to pull my shirt and bra off, I thought, Looks like I found my hobby.
Just this once, I added. Because I’m leaving. What could it hurt? Just this once.
I shoved my clothes aside on the bed as Travis lowered me onto my back. His expert tongue circled my nipple, and as I spiraled toward bliss, he lifted his mouth and said, “I read your script.”
My wobbly brain took a moment to process what he was talking about. What script? Wait—he didn’t mean?—
I dug my hands into his hair in a way that was unmistakable, and he stopped what he was doing. “You read my script?”
Travis looked up at me from between my bare breasts, this decadent man that I got to indulge in like dessert every day. His blue gaze was hazy. “You left it open on your laptop while you were in the shower,” he explained. “I read it. It’s good.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, trying not to panic. No one knew I was writing a script—not Stella, not Gwen, no one. “It’s a side thing I work on every once in a while when I have time. It isn’t finished.”
“It’s funny,” Travis said.
“It isn’t a thing,” I insisted. “It won’t get made or anything. It’s just an idea I had, and I played around with whether it would work, and I never finished it, and—it’s nothing.”
It seemed to occur to him slowly that I might be panicking a bit. “All right,” he said.
“Because I’m not a writer.”
He nodded slowly, but said, “You wrote something, though. I think that makes?—”
“No. I didn’t finish it. I’m not a screenwriter.” The idea was absurd. I was an actor—show up, say lines, go home. Actors and screenwriters were different species, oil and water in Hollywood. Writers thought actors were good-looking dummies. Actors thought writers were deeply weird nerds. End of story.
And yet I gripped Travis’s hair tighter. “You thought it was good?”
The thoughts cleared behind his eyes and he smiled lazily. “Yeah, I did.”
“You thought it was funny?” I asked, because I was pathetic.
“It is.”
“What part specifically? What did you laugh at?”
His grin expanded. Ignoring my grip on his hair, he pressed up and kissed the corner of my mouth, his touch soft. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. “I was about to give you your going-away present.”
I made a sound of frustration. He pulled away from me, leaned back, and pulled his shirt off, tossing it. My gaze moved hypnotized over his tawny skin, his dark flat nipples, his collarbones. Those tattoos. While I watched, he placed a hand on his bare chest, then slid it slowly down over his flat stomach toward his happy trail and the button of his pants. His eyes were alight with suppressed laughter. The man knew exactly what he was doing.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
Travis sighed. His hand stopped tantalizingly on the skin below his belly button, his fingertips notched behind the waist of his jeans. He looked at the ceiling as if recalling with difficulty.
“It’s all funny,” he said, “but I laughed out loud at the dinner scene.”
I forgot that I was topless as I felt a warm glow at those words. “You did?”
Travis nodded. “The banter is great in that scene. I also loved the soccer game. You have your characters come together in that one, and it’s funny, but it also really works.”
I stared up at him, amazed. My unfinished script was called Loser Academy . It was about a teenage girl who gets sent to a boarding school for losers, where—if I ever finished the script—she would become the school’s unlikely leader and hero.
No one else had ever read it until now—until Travis. And Travis thought it was funny. Not just that, he thought it was good.
I blinked up at him. He was so beautiful to me in that moment, it was like staring at the sun.
He looked down at me, oblivious. “You should finish the script, Katie,” he said. “There, I said it. Can I go back to what I was doing?”
“I want to have sex with you so much right now,” I said back. “You have no idea.”
His features softened in surprise, and then he laughed. He leaned down, bracing himself above me, and took my bottom lip between his teeth, making me shiver before he let it go. Then he kissed me properly, deep and expert, his mouth exploring mine slowly at first, then more urgently.
There was something wrong with having this much pleasure, I thought as he kissed down to my breasts again. There had to be a catch. Our relationship was fake—was that the catch? The thought touched down and then flitted away again, weightless. The word fake meant nothing when Travis’s fingers hooked into the waistband of my leggings and my underwear, tugging them down as he kissed my belly. When he pulled everything off as he went to his knees on the floor next to the bed.
“I’m going to kiss you at the airport,” he said, teasing me. “But first, I’m going to kiss you the way I like to.”
I blacked out after that. He loved doing this, and he was so, so good at it. I would never get used to the things he made me feel, sensations I didn’t have names for and couldn’t explain. I wasn’t used to the pleasure he took in it, as if my enjoyment fed his and made it stronger. I wasn’t used to how fast he could make me come, when usually it took forever and had to follow a specific set of criteria. I kept thinking the last time must have been chance, that it wouldn’t happen that way again. And then it did.
Just this once. One more time, just to see if it happens. One more.
When I had finished, he rose up and rolled on a condom. He bent my knees and pressed them to my chest, and when he came into me it changed the sensation so much that I orgasmed all over again. When Travis finished, too, I looked at the sheen of sweat on his skin and thought that four days apart would feel like forever.
When we had dressed, we lay on the bed, talking softly, reluctant to move. I really should pack my suitcase and get ready, but I wanted to put it off for a few more minutes.
I was snuggled into the crook of his neck, feeling his body radiate heat through his T-shirt, when he picked up his phone from the nightstand. He angled it above us and took a photo of us, a closeup of our faces relaxed together on the pillow.
“What are you doing?” I asked, though I already knew.
“You said we’re not official until it’s on Instagram,” he said. “Fuck it. I think we’re official.”
I smiled as he tapped on the photo. It was a great photo. We looked good. We looked happy.
Travis paused, waiting for me to object. There was supposed to be a schedule, I remembered. I should consult with Stella about when the right time was.
“Do it,” I said. “Fuck it.”
I felt his body vibrate with a quiet chuckle. “I’m a bad influence on you.”
“That’s the idea.”
He tapped open Instagram, bypassing thousands of notifications he hadn’t read, and started a new post. “Last chance.”
“Do it,” I said again.
As I watched, he uploaded the photo and typed the caption: The best way to spend time with my girl. XO. He hit Post, then exited Instagram and tossed his phone back on the nightstand.
He’d just announced to millions of fans that I was his girlfriend.
Things were about to get real.